About this project

This site publishes the Jewish metrical books of Brzostek (Brzostek Jewish community, Galicia), covering births (1876 and 1894–1917), marriages (1894–1938) and deaths (1894–1938). Page-scans of the original books were transcribed and matched against a single reconciled person index. The site is a static build — every page is just HTML, JSON, and JPGs that anyone can host on a free service such as GitHub Pages, Netlify, or Cloudflare Pages.

More about Brzostek

• A Town Called Brzostek — documentary about the town, watch on demand at Vimeo.
• Brzostek at JRI-Poland — Jewish Records Indexing – Poland's town page.
• A visit in a town called Brzostek — blog post by the Galicia Jewish Heritage Institute interns after a 2020 visit.
• Brzostek on Wikipedia — general town history.
• Genealogia w Archiwach — the Polish State Archives' genealogy portal (English interface). Brzostek's books haven't been published there yet.
• History of the Brzostek Jewish community — from Virtual Shtetl (POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews).
• Mark Schonwetter: Stories Survive — interview with Mark Schonwetter, who grew up on a large farm outside Brzostek and survived the Holocaust as a child. He later co-wrote Together: A Journey of Survival with his daughter. From the Museum of Jewish Heritage — A Living Memorial to the Holocaust (New York).
• The Polish museum that honours lost Galician Jews — the wider Galician Jewish experience is now a permanent exhibit in Kraków, curated by Jonathan Webber, a Brzostek descendant who did so much to locate these books and bring them to a wider audience.

Sources

• Brzostek birth book, 1876 and 1894–1917. 723 records, 216 page-scans.
• Brzostek death book, 1894–1938. 445 records, 161 page-scans.
• Brzostek marriage book, 1894–1938. 279 records, 150 page-scans.

How this site is organised

Record pages show what the clerk wrote. Each record page gives the English translation of one register entry, with the names spelled as the clerk wrote them, beside the photograph of the page. Nothing from other records is added to the translation.

Person pages show who we think each person is. Most people appear in several entries, often under different spellings or surnames. A person page gathers every entry we believe belongs to the same person, lists each name the registers use for them with the record it comes from ("Names in the registers"), and quotes the translation of their own entry in each record. Beside every record, the panel "Who we think these people are" links to those pages, and notes when a record writes the name differently. These identifications are our judgement from all the records together; if you think we have joined two different people, or split one person in two, please send a correction.

How names work in these books

Marriage by Jewish rite. Under Austrian law a Jewish marriage counted only if it was also registered civilly. Many couples were married by Jewish rite alone, sometimes for decades. The state treated their children as illegitimate and registered them under the mother's surname, while the family used the father's. So a register may enter a child of a long, stable marriage as "illegitimate" (nieślubne); it says nothing about the family's standing. When the father acknowledged the child, the remarks say "the undersigned acknowledges paternity" and he signs. A later civil marriage of the parents made such children legitimate; some entries carry a note saying so.

Two surnames. The clerks marked the difference between a person's legal surname and the one they used: recte X means "legally X"; false X, zwany/zwana X or "called X" means "known as X". "Called Mayer" after two given names (Moses Mayer, called Mayer) means he went by his second name. We show these exactly as the clerk wrote them, on the record page and in the person's "Names in the registers".

Married women. The clerks usually named a wife or mother as "daughter of …" or "née …" with her birth surname, not her husband's. On a person page, a woman whose civil marriage, or long-standing marriage by Jewish rite, appears in these books is shown under the surname she used as a married woman, followed by "née" and her birth surname. A woman with a child out of wedlock and no sign of a lasting union is shown under her own surname; her page states only what the registers say (for example, who acknowledged paternity).

Spelling. The clerks wrote names by ear, in Polish or German spelling, and the conventions changed over time: after the First World War Polish clerks wrote with a Z the sound German spelling writes with an S (Silberbart in 1900, Zilberbart in 1928). Different spellings of one name are not different names. Given names also vary between the Hebrew or Yiddish form and its Polish or German equivalent.

Ages and status. Ages of older people are often overstated by ten years or more. "Single" in a civil marriage entry is the person's legal status, not their life: many brides and grooms had been married by Jewish rite for years and already had children.

Inline name links

Inside each record's translation, names are links to the person pages. The link engine only considers the people that record itself identifies, never strangers from elsewhere. Where a name in the translation could not be linked, the panel beside it still names and links the person.

Glossary

Some English words in the translations carry the meaning they had when the books were written, not their modern meaning.

industrialist (przemysłowiec)

If your ancestor is called an "industrialist" in these records, do not picture a factory owner. There was no factory in Brzostek until a mill was built in 1910. The Polish word, przemysłowiec, comes from przemysł, which in older Polish meant cleverness or resourcefulness. The English word "industrialist" first appeared in 1837 with a similar sense: someone who makes a living by their own industry, in the old meaning of effort and enterprise.

In these books the clerk wrote przemysłowiec for someone who lived by running their own small business when he did not name the business. It is used for men and for women (przemysłowczyni), for married couples together, and for people who had retired ("former industrialist"). The same person may be an "industrialist" in one entry and a cattle dealer, shopkeeper or innkeeper in another.

Brzostek was a small market town. Its Christian craftsmen and the peasants of the surrounding villages made pottery, shoes and willow baskets; Jewish families mostly bought, carried and sold these goods, kept shops and taverns, and dealt in cattle, grain, eggs and hides. You will find no Jewish potter or basket maker in these books, but you will find the business side of those crafts. In Błażkowa, Moses Fichner appears as a dealer in willow basket rods and elsewhere simply as an "industrialist", and a David Fichner as overseer of a willow plantation; in Brzostek, Isaac Rubel appears as a willow dealer.

Where the registers do name a trade, they use a specific word: shoemaker (szewc), tailor (krawiec), baker (piekarz), butcher (rzeźnik), merchant (kupiec), dealer (handlarz), stallkeeper (kramarz), tavern keeper (szynkarz), or leaseholder of the liquor rights (dzierżawca propinacji). "Industrialist" is the word for everyone else who lived by their own enterprise.

labourer (wyrobnik, wyrobnica)

Literally a day labourer, someone who did manual work for others. In these books, especially in 1914–1920, the clerk uses it as a mark of a person's station in life rather than of current work: it is given to men and women of 68, 78, 85 and even 90. Read it as "of the poorer, labouring class", in contrast to the shopkeepers, dealers and "industrialists".

Corrections

Each record page and each person page has a "Submit a correction" link. The link opens a new issue on the project's GitHub repository with a pre-filled template — the page reference and a blank "what's wrong / what should it say" form. A free GitHub account is required to submit. No email address is collected, and no contact information is exposed on the site. The owner reviews each submission, edits the underlying spreadsheet if appropriate, and re-runs the build to apply the correction.

Privacy

This site has no analytics, no cookies, and no third-party trackers. The only external resources it loads are MiniSearch and Chart.js from public CDNs — both static JavaScript libraries, both delivered without user data. Corrections are routed through GitHub Issues; submission content and the submitter's GitHub username become part of the public issue thread.

Credits

Translation, transcription, and reconciliation: project team. Page-scans contributed by descendants and researchers. Site build by the project's static-site pipeline.

This work would not have been possible without the friendship and support of the maintainer of the historical record of the Jews of Brzesko. You can follow their work here: brzesko-briegel.pl.